January Android numbers show slow growth in Kit Kat while Gingerbread use continues to drop

A new year, a new month and that must mean that Google has released the latest figures for Android device platform numbers. The statistics were as usual taken from a 7-Day sample leading up to the 4th of February.

The numbers haven’t shown any drastic changes over the last month. Android 4.4 has grown from being on 1.4% of devices in December to 1.8% of devices last month. Jelly Bean has both grown and shrunk depending on which version you look at, the Android 4.2 and 4.3 have both grown, with 4.2 rising from 15.4% to 16.3% and 4.3 rising from 7.8% in December to 8.9% last month, while Android 4.1 has seen a slight drop from being on 35.9% of devices in December to 35.5% of devices last month.

The rest of the lower versions of Android have mostly seen declines in usage, Ice Cream Sandwich dropped from 16.9% to 16.1%, former Android version champion Gingerbread dropped from 21.2% to an even 1/5th of devices coming in at 20%. Honeycomb and FroYo remained static at 0.1% and 1.3% respectively.

With more devices being announced shortly (Galaxy S5 possibly this month) there may be a big injection of devices on Android 4.4 quite soon. Meanwhile we await next months statistics with anticipation.

Daniel Tyson

Dan is a die-hard Android fan. Some might even call him a lunatic. He's been an Android user since Android was a thing, and if there's a phone that's run Android, chances are he owns it (his Nexus collection is second-to-none) or has used it.

Dan's dedication to Ausdroid is without question, and he has represented us at some of the biggest international events in our industry including Google I/O, Mobile World Congress, CES and IFA.

Those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head, there is another Alcatel one from memory.

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5 years ago

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JeniSkunk

This is something which Google could, and should, fix.
They could quite easily make it mandatory that new released devices must have a current release of Android to be permitted to use gapps.

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5 years ago

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Nahaz67

I would have to agree with this. Many of the cheap Android phones are on 2.3. The update for Kit-Kat is slow because most of the phone companies haven’t released it yet, and then we have to wait on phone carriers. This is where Apple have the upper hand.